Plenty of DX9 games will benefit from a newer generation video card. You can get more speed and lower power consumption, with a card that is likely cheaper than a 7950 or X1950. And even though MS decided to limit it to DX9, OpenGL kept on going. You can get OpenGL 4.x support on XP with DX11 cards.

Ok ... Let's assume I would go with a core 2 extreme (x9770). Then I would choose Nvidia card e.g. 500-700 series - whateva. Wouldn't the 4 GB ram limit the whole system in speed and effectivity?

Lazar81 wrote:

Ok ... Let's assume I would go with a core 2 extreme (x9770). Then I would choose Nvidia card e.g. 500-700 series - whateva. Wouldn't the 4 GB ram limit the whole system in speed and effectivity?

Not really, since anything running XP and playing games wouldn't really need more than 4gb of ram to game on. Look around the forums for people's Sandy Bridge i5 rigs with 7 series nvidia cards and such.

Then a GTX 590 would work pretty well in XP?

I own a GA-P67 UD5 with a i5-2500k and a GeForce 1050 ti. It's working with windows 10. I never considered to run XP on this system... I will think about it.

Ivy bridge is probably the newest consumer Intel line of processors you can get so, i7 3770K?

I had WinXP pro running on a HP Z800 ( HP provides drivers for this ), It’s was Dual quad core Xeons at 3ghz. ( 8–cores and 16-threads total ). With 48gb of ram but could support up to 128gb of ram.
And an Nvidia GTX 960 , Nvidia has XP drivers for this.
https://www.nvidia.com/Download/driverResults … px/105040/en-us
With a PCIe SSD drive.
It ran very stable and fast and supported all CPU cores and ram.
But you could probably find a Fast Core-2-quad at 3ghz. + and do well also.

But this motherboard and cpu combo would work well too.
I used it with XP and it works well.
https://youtu.be/uzm5yBYIR6Q

A 3770K could very well be the fastest you can go on XP.
Atleast Intel supplies drivers for IB on Win XP.
Also the fastest graphics card i can find that officially supports Win XP is the GTX 780TI.

edit: 3770K mentioned above.

I wasn't imagining something so young for an XP Build. I have no doubt that an i7 3770k would do a great job with XP.
But for hardware i focussed on things that came out about a year before official support for XP ended. I was thinking about parts that where up to date when XP was still in use on most PCs.

Think it's something around q1 2008
GPU was already a pain to find

I feel like for most games one would want to play on windows XP something like an e8500 is really good and very cheap nowadays.

bofh.fromhell wrote:

A 3770K could very well be the fastest you can go on XP.

I hope it won't be a stupid question but does Ivy Bridge Xeon work with those drivers? I have a Xeon E3-1275V2 in my main rig right now, one day it may be re-purposed. From a strictly technical aspect it shouldn't make any difference but market segmentation can foul it anyway 😵

IIRC an E5-2670 can run XP fine

HP Z420/Z620/Z820 all have XP drivers

I'm using Radeon HD7850 on my XP machine. I believe the last Radeon with XP support is HD7870, but I chose 7850 because it was significantly cheaper and not that much slower in benchmarks.

As mentioned - i7 3770k is probably the fastest officially XP compatible CPU. Ivy Bridge Xeons will works as well, even the Socket 2011 models, although there is not much point to use > 4 cores. Haswell also works with XP, but drivers for some onboard components will be a problem. Skylake can run XP too, but it requires various hacks to get it working and none of the integrated components will work... so useless for anything other that 3Dmark.

As for the GPU - on the Nvidia side, all Kepler based cards have XP support (so up to GTX 780 Ti) and I believe some Maxwell based cards have XP drivers too, maybe it involves some modifications. All radeon up to HD 7970 should be ok on XP as well.

Btw - I would definitely avoid any dual GPU cards or SLI/CF, unless you know very well what you can expect from such solution.

The fastest XP setup would just be the fastest modern Intel processor coupled with the fastest video card that has drivers for XP. Nothing complicated. The CPU would be running in 32-bit mode but that's OK.

Theoretically, a 9900k with 64gb of RAM and four GTX 980ti GPUs in SLI.

The fastest graphics card with XP drivers is the nvidia gtx 980ti. From what I understand though, there are color issues with VGA that have to be corrected in the driver software, but it is supported.

The fastest supported platform for XP is the Ivy Bridge socket 1155, however it is possible to get XP installed on AHCI SATA devices with some hacks and work arounds (although I haven't attempted it). Seeing as the most advanced APIs for XP are OpenGL (I think the latest still works?) and Directx9.0c, you really don't need more than a 3670k.

If you wanted to get really crazy, you could install another GPU for a dedicated physX card. So four way SLI with a fifth 980ti for dedicated physX would be the absolute ceiling. In reality though, a single card would perform better in 95% of games, with maybe only a handful of titles benefiting from more than 2 way SLI. Also, anything that can run on XP would be maxed out at 1080p with a single card.

With a memory patch, you can get 32bit windows to run with more than 4gb of memory, up to 64gb with the pae patch. There is apparently a pretty significant performance penalty when accessing beyond 4gb of memory though (not that you typically would, especially playing games). Another configuration is to have 4gb of dedicated memory with 8gb or 12gb formatted as a RAM disk for the disk swap space. Not that you need that either.

keenmaster486 wrote:

The fastest XP setup would just be the fastest modern Intel processor coupled with the fastest video card that has drivers for XP. Nothing complicated. The CPU would be running in 32-bit mode but that's OK.

Why would it have to be running in 32-bit mode?

XP does come in an x64 flavor as well. The x64 drivers are mature as well. There are also some games that have x64 executables which run a bit faster than their 32-bit counterparts,

The only downside would be that you wouldn't be able to run 16-bit programs.

Azarien wrote:

I'm using Radeon HD7850 on my XP machine. I believe the last Radeon with XP support is HD7870, but I chose 7850 because it was significantly cheaper and not that much slower in benchmarks.

How far back does the game compatibility go with that card?

cyclone3d wrote:

XP does come in an x64 flavor as well. The x64 drivers are mature as well. There are also some games that have x64 executables which run a bit faster than their 32-bit counterparts,

Well, but at that point you might as well just run Windows 7. But then again, the kind of machine we're talking about is better for 7 anyway. Part of the whole reason for running XP to begin with is because of how well it works with 2001-2007-ish-era 32-bit hardware, pre-AMD64.

Perhaps a better question would be: what is the fastest XP setup that is still a 32-bit CPU? In which case the answer would probably be a dual-core Pentium 4 or Xeon, overclocked, with some kind of high-end Nvidia GPU.

As soon as you go 64-bit, you had better have a 64-bit OS to take full advantage of the system, and immediately your best option (depending on your RAM requirements) is either Windows 7 or some Linux distro.

cyclone3d wrote:

XP does come in an x64 flavor as well. The x64 drivers are mature as well. There are also some games that have x64 executables which run a bit faster than their 32-bit counterparts,

Well, but at that point you might as well just run Windows 7. But then again, the kind of machine we're talking about is better for 7 anyway. Part of the whole reason for running XP to begin with is because of how well it works with 2001-2007-ish-era 32-bit hardware, pre-AMD64.

Perhaps a better question would be: what is the fastest XP setup that is still a 32-bit CPU? In which case the answer would probably be a dual-core Pentium 4 or Xeon, overclocked, with some kind of high-end Nvidia GPU.

As soon as you go 64-bit, you had better have a 64-bit OS to take full advantage of the system, and immediately your best option (depending on your RAM requirements) is either Windows 7 or some Linux distro.